The City of Eagle River, as a result of action taken during the city council’s March 10 meeting, will implement a fee schedule for open records requests. The move follows a raft of requests for documents dating back several years, initiated by Eagle River resident Kathryn Craffey.
A March 27, 2026 piece in The Lakeland Times of Minocqua outlined the action. According to the story:
“There are a lot of hours that get put into open records,” City Administrator Robin Ginner explained to the council while presenting the proposal for a fee schedule. “This is certainly nothing to stop somebody from being able to access public records. It’s simply to allow for the city to charge fees that are the actual, necessary, direct costs of specific tasks.”
It’s allowed by state law, she explained.
“The fees that we put on there are in line with the guidance of the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ),”Ginner said.
Mayor Deb Brown asked the administrator if the schedule of fees presented to the council came straight from the DOJ.
“Yes and we went through it and updated it with the charges that were appropriate for Eagle River specifically,” Ginner said. “There are weeks where it is hours and hours of time and it’s just not right that when we’re supposed to be working for everybody in the city, we’re only working…” she trailed off before picking back up and telling the council in the past two weeks, she and city clerk Becky Bolte “combined put almost 20 hours in.”
“It’s not right for the rest of the taxpayers to have to pay that amount,”Ginner said. “So anywhere that these are allowable, we want to be able to basically recoup our taxpayers for that.”
She said the proposed fee schedule had been reviewed and approved by the city’s attorney, Steve Garbowicz.
Craffey said she was investigating what she described as two instances of the city of Eagle River “not following state open-meetings laws and not delivering needed transparency to the public.”
The first involved a 2022 vote by the city’s room-tax commission.
The second instance was when Eagle River was compelled in 2023 to repay $1.7 million in tax incremental finance district development funds which were improperly spent by the city government between 2012 and 2021. Craffey’s extensive records searches also pertained to that long-term situation.
“The second situation I offer to you that has lacked needed transparency is the misspent TIDs — the TID funds,” she said. “As it was released to the public in October 2024, to date, no hearing has been offered on the matter.”
Craffey said it was only through an open-records request she found that on Nov. 20, 2023, in a letter from Brown and former city administrator Joe Laux to the former mayor and city council, they asked, “among other things — ‘Does a conflict-of-interest exist between the audit team and the former treasurer?’”
“These are just two communications from officials sitting here today,” Craffey said. “It would seem the city of Eagle River needs to assure its adherence to open-meetings and open-records laws, as well as practice proper due diligence and the principles of proper government, before attempting to stifle the public’s ability to acquire needed information via public-records (requests).”
“We aren’t stifling anybody,” Brown replied. “It’s still the same. Nothing’s changing, except what wecan charge, and that is very limited.”
“But I ask you to adhere to state laws,” Craffey said.
“We are doing our darnedest,” Brown replied.
“These are two instances,” Craffey retorted.
“We are human beings and we make mistakes,” Brown told her.
When the discussion circled back around to the proposed fee schedule, Bolte addressed specifics of the policy.
“On top of using (DOJ’s) rubric for how to charge and what is chargeable, part of this policy also lists — so everybody is aware — of what is chargeable and what isn’t,” she explained. “For the clerk’s position, it’s a little different … locating (records) is one of the places where, if it takes over $50 worth of fees to locate the items, we’d give them an estimate beforehand of what we anticipate what the charge would be.”
Fee schedule
Fees for paper copies of documents are set at one cent per page for black-and-white; six cents per page for color. Fees under $1 will be waived.
Digital copies of documents provided by email or other electronic means will not carry a fee unless a CD or DVD is used for storage, in which case, $1 will be charged per disc.
The schedule states specialized skills, equipment, or technology may result in additional costs.
When a city employee needs to locate records in response to a request, a charge of $34.58 per hour will be applied. When documents requiring redactions prior to public release are requested, a law enforcement officer must perform that duty and an hourly charge of $26 will apply unless “an employee with special skills may be necessary to redact and a higher hourly rate may be assessed.”
When documents are requested to be shipped through the U.S. Postal Service, a rate of 78 cents per ounce will apply.
People’s right to know
Following the meeting, The Lakeland Times emailed Ginner for comments and asked whether the new fee schedule is something city officials had been contemplating for a while, or whether it was taken up in response to Craffey’s recent requests.
“This is a topic we have discussed internally in the past but the increase in requests over the past few months prompted me to bring the policy forward for council review and approval,” she wrote the Times. “The decision to begin tracking the number of hours spent responding to open records requests was made within the past couple of weeks. I felt it was important for the council to understand how much staff time is being dedicated to fulfilling these requests.”
The Times referred to Brown’s assumption the situation regarding the 2022 room-tax vote had been rectified and asked Ginner if that was the case.
“I’m not sure how we were supposed to rectify it beyond making sure something like that never happens again,”she wrote. “It was a mistake I made when I was maybe a year into my position. So obviously I’m much more aware of how to handle different situations these days.”
